Review: Skype finally does VoIP right on the iPhone

Skype has finally arrived for the iPhone and Ars has tested it out. We found …

Another long-standing iPhone request was answered yesterday with Skype's official release of its iPhone app. On users' wish lists since the day Jobs previewed the original iPhone at Macworld Expo '07, Skype for iPhone delivers almost all of the company's features and functionality, save for just a few caveats.

What it is

Skype's iPhone app exhibits the company's trademark bubbly aesthetic. From the splash page to the text chat theme, Skype for iPhone really does look and feel like Skype, at least, as much as it can when stuffed into the iPhone's 480 x 360 display.

To get an unfortunate unpleasantry out of the way early, jailbreakers should be warned about Skype's tendency to crash on their phones. According to iPhone news site BigBoss, a couple of jailbroken apps and customizations are conflicting with Skype, causing it to crash either when typing text or after about a minute of using the app. Some fixes are in place, including updating to a new mobile substrate with Cydia and disabling Clippy and custom keyboard "tick" sounds.

Moving along: five buttons at the bottom of Skype for iPhone expose much of its functionality: Contacts, Chats, Call, History, and My Info. The first displays an alphabetized list of your contacts, complete with the handy right-hand letter list that makes scrolling easy and an All/Online toggle at the top for filtering out offline users. A plus button allows for adding new contacts by searching the Skype directory, directly typing a phone number, or importing from your iPhone's contact directory. A search field allows power users to quickly pick a needle out the haystack that is their buddy list.

Tapping into a contact shows a barebones profile page that features the user's name, Skype name, icon, status, mobile number, access to his or her full profile, and buttons for either calling or chatting. A gear menu also allows you to delete or outright block the contact, revealing a high level of control over one's account that fortunately persists through other aspects of the app.

Switching between text chats could be easier. Right now, you have to tap out to the Chats list, then tap into another chat to switch conversations. I don't think anyone would have blamed Skype for ripping off AIM for iPhone's design here by implementing its great swipe-to-switch UI. iPhone-like dots line the bottom of AIM's chat window, one for each conversation, and you simply swipe left and right to move between chats. As it stands now, Skype (and any chat app like it) is only one or two steps away from Mobile Mail's grueling UI that requires too many taps to switch between mailboxes.

Skype's Call panel intelligently mimics the iPhone's big button layout. As the saying goes, "if it ain't broke"—but in fact it was broken before Apple designed a decent touch-based phone dialing UI, so it's nice to see Skype not attempting to redesign the modern wheel. An Address Book button in the lower left here provides access to the iPhone's catalog of contacts, complete with Groups filtering and search.

The History panel does (most of) what it should, offering a record of all activity and missed calls. Skype could have broken free of its Apple mimicry here, however, by adding second or even third filters for incoming and outgoing activity. I don't make a lot of calls, but it sometimes helps to be able to separate out a bunch of 800, 773, and 312 phone numbers by which direction they are flowing. This request goes ditto for Apple's own Phone app.

Skype's final functionality hub is My Info, offering quick access to bare essentials like your online status, mood, an Edit Profile tab, and basic account info like your remaining Skype Credit, Online Number status, and Voicemail. The Profile tab is another one of those appreciated areas where Skype built in as much control over one's profile as possible. You can change just about any of your information, including name, birthday, location, homepage, and About Me, all with nary a computer in sight.

How it performs

In a nutshell, Skype for iPhone's call quality is quite wonderful—most of the time. You probably heard already, but it bears repeating: Skype for iPhone only works on a WiFi network, and displays a denial about "restrictions that may be placed on your data plan" when a call is attempted on a cellular network. The last thing AT&T wants is for lucrative (but insatiably data-gobbling) iPhone customers to be skirting around their voice plans and thrashing the 3G network even further, so we would not recommend holding your breath for a change of heart on that policy.

We made a few phone calls from our iPhone 3G to other Skypers using both a PC and an iPhone. We had a strong signal over an 802.11n AirPort Extreme Base Station (pre-gigabit), and call quality was typically excellent. My unwilling victims reported that I sounded quite clear, and they did as well. Once, however, my end of a call degraded after about four minutes, and I got "all buzzy." The caller said it was tolerable at first, but then it degraded into the typical "o-*k, I'll c*%ll y**$$uu bba&*#k." Calling her back for a three minute call right afterwards resulted in no such hiccups.

The only other quirk of the call was that my iPhone got noticeably warm during even the four-to-five minute call. It was warmer than it would be on a call over AT&T's network, though I have admittedly not been able to maintain such a long call recently over said network, so I may be out of touch on this comparison. For those not paying attention, this is where the proverbial sarcastic wink would appear in conversation.

Interestingly, I noticed through my testing that if I'm signed into Skype with both a desktop client and my iPhone, my iPhone will ring first when someone calls.

What it ain't

For all of Skype for iPhone 1.0's goodness, it is still lacking in a few key aspects that are worth mentioning. Most notably, Skype for iPhone lacks major features like conference calling and video chat. The former may be chalked up to a feature priority not making the 1.0 list, as Skype 2.5 for Windows Mobile gained conference calling just this past December. The latter, video chatting, is something that no iPhone apps do, mostly because current iPhones lack any sort of convenient front-facing camera. If Apple is indeed preparing to announce a rumored new iPhone at WWDC 2009 this summer, though, that could change.

Besides the aforementioned text chat UI clunkiness, warm in-call phone, and the call quality quirk we ran into, Skype for iPhone exhibits a few other minor drawbacks of varying degrees. In particular, using multiple accounts is not that easy, and buying more Skype Credit requires an external visit to Skype's desktop site in Mobile Safari. This isn't too big a deal, but an iPhone-optimized site would have been a great sign of polish.

It should also go without saying, but the iPhone OS 2.x's inability to run applications in the background means that Skype for iPhone is not much use once you switch to doing something else. Apple's Push Notifications feature in the upcoming iPhone OS 3.0 release should help solve some of that problem (if Skype is on the ball and incorporates them into a new version, of course), though you must still remember to keep the app in the foreground while you're on a call or else you'll lose your connection. For now, you will have to put up with scheduling your incoming calls ahead of time.

Conclusion

I said it at the beginning of this review and I'll say it again: Skype for iPhone delivers on most, but not all, of the potential of Skype's VoIP service. The app is designed well, call quality is surprisingly excellent (most of the time), and this 1.0 release leaves plenty of room for the company to pick up the straggling features with a future release. I can recommend Skype for iPhone to new, existing, and even enthusiastic users, as Skype has finally arrived on the iPhone.

Originally posted by Mike_B:Will someone please explain to this noob why one would have to make a call via WiFi instead of just using the phone?

Is it only in situations where there is a lack of service or is this somehow cheaper to make calls via WiFi?

I think it's to give the impression that they're giving people what they've been asking for (i.e. Skype on a smartphone) without all that messy business of getting the point (i.e. that they want to use 3G VOIP instead of paying for calls).

"Will someone please explain to this noob why one would have to make a call via WiFi instead of just using the phone"

Because you normally have a flat data rate and skype telephonie costs almost nothing. This is especially relevant in Europe where you normally have much cheaper phone tarifs with less included minutes etc.

Will someone please explain to this noob why one would have to make a call via WiFi instead of just using the phone

Theres nothing technically preventing you from doing that, the only reason that you have to use WiFi to use Skype/other VOIP software is that the telecoms companies (AT&T, TMobile etc) dont want to be seen as "dumb pipes". Basically they know that they would lose a lot of money if they allowed you to. Since calling someone using the actual phone and not skype costs them the same but is much more expensive to you, they want you to pay more.

I fail to see how it's VOIP done right when you can't receive incoming calls and it cuts out if some other app (eg. someone ringing you over GSM) cuts you off. I know that's not Skype's fault but still it's hardly 'done right'.

Originally posted by foresmac108:I think some of you are forgetting that VoIP is forbidden over 3G by most carrier's terms of service.

VoIP and teathering are still the 2 reasons most (cheap) techies were intrested in smartphones in the first place. It was most certainly the reason the G1 had so many people intrested before Tmobile eventually revealed that they weren't stupid either.

What about Skype on the Android platform? T-Mobile made a decent compromise and allows full use of Skype over the networks. Only catch? It uses airtime minutes. No biggie really, and if it means I can call my friend in Holland on his cell phone for $0.28/min instead of $1.50 a minute using Skype, I'm happy with my G1. Not to mention T-Mobile was nice enough to give me the Sim Unlock code for my G1 for when I travel overseas and use pre-paid SIMs.

> I fail to see how it's VOIP done right when you can't receive incoming calls and it cuts out if some other app (eg. someone ringing you over GSM) cuts you off. I know that's not Skype's fault but still it's hardly 'done right'.

There is a simple solution to this: Apple should allow any application to plug its voice system into Phone, and its text messaging into Messages (the soon-to-be-renamed SMS app). In this case, Skype would plug its codecs and routing system into Phone, allowing you to "Call on Skype" from the normal Phone. This way you'd get incoming calls, the ability to exit out without losing your call, and other inbound calls would not bother you and just go right to voicemail.

Other plug-ins might include a SIP system, WMA and adaptors for GChat, MSN and Yahoo Chat. The carriers would actually be totally in favor of a WMA plug-in, I'm sure AT&T and Rogers have already asked for this because they both sell reasonably priced $15-a-month unlimited calling plans using it. They could white-label their plug-ins with a single button to setup an account, and instantly get millions of new customers.

Everyone write to Apple's suggestion box and ask for this. If they add it, the iPhone becomes the best _phone_ on the market.